Free Republic

Eric Voegelin on Gnostic Modernity A previous essay to this one on José Ortega y Gasset began with the claim that the past speaks to the present more pertinently than the present speaks to itself, but that the present, in assessing itself as the culmination of human advancement, actively disdains the past and prefers to stuff its ears. The essence of the modern psyche – which Ortega explores in his Revolt of the Masses (1930) – is paradoxically to be at once emphatically assured of its knowledge and wisdom but, in Ortega’s phrase, conscientiously ignorant of anything outside its radically...

The Atheist Perversion of Reality By Jean F. Drew Atheism we have always had with us it seems. Going back in time, what was formerly a mere trickle of a stream has in the modern era become a raging torrent. Karl Marx’s gnostic revolt, a paradigm and methodology of atheism, has arguably been the main source feeding that stream in post-modern times. What do we mean by “gnostic revolt?” Following Eric Voëgelin’s suggestions, our definition here will be: a refusal to accept the human condition, manifesting as a revolt against the Great Hierarchy of Being, the most basic description of...

Freeper Investigation: Original Intent and Constitutional Jurisprudence by Jean F. Drew English and Anglo-American law’s core principle is the opposition to abusive power as exercised by the state. As Dan Gifford writes in “The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason,” “The law is not the law regardless if it be good, bad, or indifferent. There is a higher moral law, originating within ancient Jewish law, which requires individual responsibility for opposing evil and promoting goodness. It is from this basic tenet that English law and Anglo-American law embody the following principle: The individual has rights against the...

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists – whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence – with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his...

THE HISTORY OF THE RACE IDEA An Introduction by Eric Voegelin In terms of thought images, our point of departure in this study is the necessity to create a conceptual apparatus for integrating the living substances, which became visible for the first time after the dissolution of the creationist view of the world, into a philosophical system. This raises the problem of organism . . . What unites the race theory rooted in this era with liberalism and Marxism is the will to deprive the state of history, to hand it over to the masses, to destroy the historical...